What Bela Lugosi can teach every artist

Bela Lugosi was destined for immortality from the moment he donned the Dracula cape and arched his eyebrows for Tod Browning's camera. But thanks in large part to Tim Burton, the last two decades have seen Bela achieving a second everlasting life as the pitiable and desiccated muse of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Casual fans could be forgiven for believing that Martin Landau's portrayal of Lugosi writhing in a wading pool with a rubber octopus in Bride of the Monster was an accurate depiction of Bela hitting bottom, but truth be told, Bela's career had dipped lower than that any number of times. 

I've watched a lot of Bela Lugosi movies over the years. The Ed Wood movies are certainly in the lower tier, but at least they're made by a director with a distinct personal style and, more importantly, a genuine appreciation for Lugosi's talents and place in cinema history. 

Compare that to, say, William Beaudine, an insanely prolific, zero-budget hired gun who cranked out endless, soulless genre pictures. Beaudine directed what I would classify as the true low point of Bela's career, 1952's Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Lugosi's star was long since descended by '52, but this movie has so little going for it that I don't question the producer's decision to slap the star's name in the title and cash in on what little bankability he had left.

Actually, Bela isn't even the star of the movie that borrowed his name. He has fairly limited screen time as the mad scientist who torments co-leads Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, a real-life comedy duo whose entire shtick was doing a passable impression of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Mitchell and Petrillo's subsequent lives and film careers are fascinating in their own right, but they're beyond excruciating in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, playing a nightclub act stranded on a remote tropical island populated by friendly, grotesquely stereotyped natives and one rogue geneticist who's determined to transform Mitchell into an ape.

It's an icky, unfunny wallow in undistinguished, undignified filmmaking, but you'd never know it to watch Bela's performance. Bela gives it his all, playing the role with all the sly intensity and creepy charm that marked the best work of his younger days. Obviously he had to know he wasn't involved with any kind of masterpiece - this was a star vehicle for a professional Jerry Lewis impersonator, for heaven's sake - but it just wasn't in Bela's nature to half-ass it for a paycheck.

I've seen Bela waist-deep in all manner of dreck, be it playing fifth or sixth fiddle to the sub-vaudevillian antics of the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla, toddling behind Basil Rathbone as a mute manservant in The Black Sleep or lurching around the city stealing spinal fluid in a ludicrous hairy mask in Beaudine's The Ape Man. (Side note: Bela Lugosi appeared in an inordinate number of simian-themed movies.) He got handed scripts possessed of not an ounce of imagination: he was repeatedly asked to rehash Dracula with diminishing returns and made at least four movies wherein he played a scientist driven mad by the death of his wife. It's safe to say that the vast majority of Bela's résumé was irredeemable garbage.

Despite all of that, I could not point you to a weak Bela Lugosi performance. Even in the direst of cinematic circumstances, Bela threw his heart into every vaguely drawn part. He played to the rafters, exuding menace and charisma as he glowered over long-forgotten actors many degrees his inferior. By all accounts he resented the hell out of his typecasting as a horror movie heavy, but he never let that distaste leak through to the screen. He did his damnedest to make sure people left the theater muttering, "That was an awful Bela Lugosi movie" and not "Bela Lugosi was awful in that movie."

Compare that ethic to any number of Lugosi's b-movie counterparts over the ages. Bela was far from the only trained, talented actor forced to slum it in terrible genre films. Lon Chaney, Jr's late-career performances (Spider-Baby excepted) range from bored to embarrassed. John Carradine never failed to deliver the bombast, but many of his low-budget roles were scarcely more than disdainful paycheck cameos. Vincent Price was dependable but prone to slipping onto hammy autopilot. Donald Pleasance occasionally roused himself for a sketchy role, as in Raw Meat, but more often than not just looked irritated to be wasting his talents on such trash. Of all the great names of bad horror, only Peter Cushing comes close to Bela in his dedication to craft in the face of adversity. But even there, Cushing's screen persona was far more mannerly, his menace much quieter. Even in the depths of dreck like The Blood Beast Terror, which found him wrestling a bloodthirsty humanoid moth-monster, Cushing was allowed his dignity. He was certainly never left to stumble around a papier-mache jungle while being outsmarted by Sammy frigging Petrillo and Steve Calvert in a gorilla suit.

But Bela was, and he squeezed every drop of lemonade out of every bag of lemons Hollywood handed him. Granted, he had a notorious opiate addiction driving him to take work wherever it was available, but he could have easily phoned in his performances in those low-grade cheapies and no one on set would have said a word about it. But he never did, and that's remarkable.

That's why I count Bela Lugosi as one of my greatest inspirations. I've been writing for money and pleasure for my entire adult life. In that time I've been asked to write all manner of things that do not interest me in the least, and plenty more things I might initially have dismissed as "beneath me." I'm the first to admit that I've made some unadvisable choices in my writing career, but I can't come up with many examples of me not putting my best effort into a project. Whether it's a feature for a national publication, a concert blurb for a local magazine or even a casual tweet on a Wednesday night, I try my hardest to make sure it's the best piece of writing I can muster.

Some of that is probably because I still believe - perhaps foolishly - that I'm a writer on the rise and every piece of work I put out to the world is a potential audition. I'll be interested to see whether I can sustain this attitude if and when I find myself irredeemably over the hill and past my peak, as Bela surely realized he was by the time he was paired up with Petrillo and Mitchell, or when he was "rescued" by Ed Wood.  It's one thing to give it your all when there's a promise of greater things shimmering on the horizon and quite another when all is lost and the art is truly just for the art's sake. Should I ever come to such a turn, I can only hope that I manage to do it as gracefully as Bela Lugosi.

The four most Minnesotan moments in 'Fargo'

When folks from other parts of the country learn I live in Minnesota, they usually ask three things: 1) Does it really get that cold there? 2) Do you know Prince? 3) Is it just like Fargo? The answers are, of course, 1) Yes. 2) No. 3) Sorta. The Coen brothers’ classic isn’t a documentary by any means, but it gets a lot of things exactly right.

"Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him, then." 

I know quite a few Minnesotans who resent Fargo because “we don’t really talk like that.” It’s true that some of the accents are far broader than you’ll usually hear in the Twin Cities metro region, but some are so spot-on that all is forgiven. No performance is more Minnesotan than Bain Boehlke as the deadpan Mr. Mora, the bartender who takes a break from shoveling to tip the cops off to a funny-looking guy “goin’ crazy out dere at da lake.”  My mom’s family is from Coon Lake, a rural community about 30 miles north of Saint Paul. If one of her uncles had ever been a vital witness in a murder case, the police interview would have sounded almost exactly like this.

Good Company

Steve and Sharon Edelman are members of the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame for good reason. Their dopey, cheery chat show Good Company was a local institution throughout the ‘80s, an oasis of gentle good-nature in the desert of daytime TV depravity. In other words, it’s exactly what a suburban housewife like Jean Lundegaard would be chuckling softly at over her knitting on a snowy weekday afternoon.

“It’s always more!”

The most unsung hero of the Fargo ensemble is Gary Houston as the frustrated customer trying to cut through Jerry Lundegaard’s car dealer double-speak. He embodies Minnesota Nice stretched to its breaking point. Everything about his delivery of “You lied to me, Mr. Lundegaard. You’re a bald-faced liar. A… fffucking liar!” is Minnesotan to the core. As angry as he is, he still addresses Jerry as “Mr. Lundegaard” in a show of respect for his position, and of disappointment that Jerry isn’t earning that respect. And then there’s that brief pause. That split second of silence tells us that this is a guy who never curses. Even here, in a situation that obviously calls for it, he has to psych himself up before pulling out the big guns. (Jerry has a point, though. In a Minnesota winter, you’re gonna want the Tru-Coat.)

Jerry’s frozen meltdown

Granted, Jerry is venting frustration with something a little bigger than a Minnesota winter here. Still, there’s not a motorist in the upper Midwest who can’t sympathize with this scene. The misery of chopping away at a thick-caked windshield, knowing that the immediate reward for your labor will be a soul-killing commute down ice-slicked highways, is enough to make anybody flip out. What makes this scene quintessentially Minnesotan, though, is Jerry’s follow-up to his brief tantrum. He picks up the scraper, collects himself and gets back to the loathsome task at hand. That’s what you do in these parts, mainly because it’s all you can do.

"Confessions of a video virgin" or "What's in the boooox?"

For someone who grew up to be a fairly devoted cinephile, I was a pretty sheltered kid. I grew up in the country, in a converted grain barn half a mile from the nearest paved road. We got four, sometimes five channels on our fuzzy 19-inch TV, depending on the weather. (Even if we’d had the money for cable, I don’t think our local provider delivered that far out.) We didn’t own a VCR until my great uncle gave us a hand-me-down RCA behemoth when I was around 12. Before that, we’d occasionally rent a video player and a stack of movies as a weekend treat. My selection was pretty limited, as my parents were very dutiful about keeping my brother and me on a righteous path and protecting us from the uglier side of the entertainment industry. There were a lot of re-watchings of the Star Wars trilogy, Yellow Submarine and old Laurel & Hardy shorts.

The point I’m very gradually getting to is that I didn’t see horror movies as a kid. The closest I came was when the local Fox affiliate showed a week’s worth of those Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy/Frankenstein/The Invisible Man movies one summer, but there wasn’t much resembling genuine scares in those. I didn’t see a bona fide horror film until my fifth grade field trip to Washington, D.C., when someone played the not particularly terrifying The Lost Boys on the bus-wide video system.

You’d think that this combination of protective parenting and backwoods exile would have kept me ignorant of the horrors of Hollywood. Quite the opposite, actually. In the grand childhood tradition of yearning for that which is forbidden, I became obsessed with horror movie video boxes. Every time we took a trip to the video shop or the grocery store, I couldn't help myself from lingering in the horror section, where out-of-context imagery from all sorts of '80s trash played hell with my fragile, Christian psyche. I had no idea what the actual movies were like – and I had no real desire to find out – but there was more than enough evil stuff going on on the covers to keep me wide awake at night, listening to the coyotes howl in the valley (seriously, we were hill people).

I was reminded of all of my video box nemeses recently when The AV Club ran a Halloween feature on “Entertainment that terrified us.” That inspired me to seek out some of the old nightmare fuel and see just how much of the terror holds up. I was plagued by dozens and dozens of covers back in the day, but these are a few that stand out as the worst offenders.

House


I think what got me about this one was the ambiguity of it. Whose severed hand was that? What business did it have with the residents of the titular house? How the hell did it float like that? I lost a lot of sleep coming up with answers to all of those questions. It didn’t help any that the artwork reminded me of the illustrations in those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, another reliable source of middle-of-the-night terror. The dangling veins and tendons made me look down at my own skinny wrists and reflect on how fragile a thing the human body really was.

Current take: I’ve never seen House, but looking back, it seems silly to have been scared of anything that prominently featured George Wendt.

The Nightmare on Elm Street movies


I think most of my classmates had similarly sheltered existences, but in a school as small as Leon Elementary (Fewer than 100 students, grades 1-6), pretty much everything is a community experience. Just the images of Freddy Krueger’s claws and scars would have been enough to freak me out, but mixing them with Brian Brooks’ vivid descriptions of Freddy’s various eviscerations created a potent cocktail of dread.

Current take: I’ve seen a few of these as a grown-up. They’re pretty fun, really. Wes Craven at the top of his game can craft a damned entertaining horror flick, and Robert Englund’s performance as Freddy is deservedly iconic.

Firestarter


I really couldn’t tell you what disturbed me so much about this cover. There’s nothing inherently scary about it. For some reason, though, I found the image of little Drew Barrymore glaring intensely while some sort of inferno erupts behind her deeply unnerving. Obviously, something terrible has happened to push her to this point, and whatever she’s doing is going to lead to even worse things. I know some kids would have found the idea of a girl their own age being able to wreak havoc on the adult world exciting and liberating. Me, I never got the whole resentment of grown-ups shtick. Grown-ups made my meals, got me to school and kept me safe from the evils of the world. Why would I want to give that up?

Current take: I caught Firestarter on TV a while back. There was nothing to be afraid of – it’s really more of a thriller than a horror film. I was surprised at how much I liked it. I might even call it the best performance of Drew’s career.

Basket Case


Once, when I was around eight or nine, we were at my parents’ friends’ house and I stumbled upon their teenage son’s stash of comic books. The first story I flipped to involved a soldier waking up from surgery to discover that his arms and legs had been amputated. There was a full-page splash panel of the terrified man reaching his bandaged stumps up to the ceiling and screaming, “What did you do to me? I’m a BASKET CASE!” I shut the comic right there and went home that day with a shiny new disturbing image to worm around in my brain. From then on, the Basket Case box was a double-whammy for me. I was mortified both by the slimy claw creeping out of that wicker basket and by flashbacks to that unfortunate soldier in some unknown ‘80s horror comic.

Current take: I recently watched Basket Case and rather loved it. It’s a perfectly sleazy little slab of exploitation cinema, the way mama used to make it.

Mother’s Day


OK, this one still makes me shiver a little bit. There’s something about the combination of that grinning, skull-faced old lady, her freakish sons and the frozen scream on the lips of that decapitated head that moves beyond horror and into the realm of pure sadism. This one didn’t scare me so much as fill me with an existential dread. I’d heard and read enough stories about real-life serial killers to know that this kind of evil did exist in the world. I was still at the age of wanting to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and the smirking cruelty of this video box called that into question.

Current take: From what I’ve heard about Mother’s Day – it was one of my wife’s traumatic childhood movies – it’s every bit as brutal as I’d imagined it. I like a good horror film, but I don’t take kindly to rape and torture.

Xtro


Why was Xtro my number one video box bogeyman? It’s hard to say. Looking at it now, it’s by far the cheesiest of any of these images – just a badly drawn alien juxtaposed with a serious-faced little boy. I think what really got to me was that tagline. I interpreted that to mean that the boy on the box was going to slowly turn into the abomination behind him. There was something about unholy transformations that shook me to my very core. I was also frightened by the pull quote from Twilight Zone Magazine (seriously) about Xtro making xenophobes of us all. Not knowing the definition of “xenophobe,” I used context clues to surmise, ironically enough, that it was the name of an alien race. The notion of everyone I knew and loved being transformed into slathering space monsters invoked terror on par with the Book of Revelations for me.

Current take: I’ve never seen Xtro – I’m not even sure if it’s available on DVD – but I’ve heard it’s pretty laughable. I kind of want to watch it and I kind of don’t. I’m pretty sure the real thing wouldn’t live up to my nightmare visions, and some part of me wants to preserve my boyhood fear. In a weird way, it’s sort of comforting.

"Requiem for a wasteland" or "There's cheese in them thar hills"

From the steaming jungle of Fitzcarraldo to the snowy wasteland of Fargo, an impressive shooting location has been a vital element of many a classic movie. Great locations have also been responsible for classing up any number of unremarkable movies. Just look at the countless no-budget Westerns shot in Arizona’s monument valley and the mountain country of Italy. It’s a perfectly logical train of thought: If the best we can offer our audience is Lee Van Cleef shooting it out with badly dubbed Italian extras, we may as well give them something nice to look at in the background.

That’s all well and good, but I’ve always had a soft spot for filmmakers who lacked the budget or the motivation to move out of their own backyard. I’m talking about movies shot in my all-time favorite location: the arid hills outside of Los Angeles.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m a biased Midwestern boy who’s partial to verdant pastures and green, rolling valleys. I’ve seen quite a few places and still rank Western Wisconsin among the loveliest I’ve laid eyes on. That said, I’ve also been to the arid hills outside of Los Angeles. They’re not without their charms, but there is very little about the arid hills outside of Los Angeles that I would describe as especially scenic or beautiful. And yet, countless directors of the ‘50s and ‘60s dragged their barely paid crews and barely verbal actors out to the arid hills outside of Los Angeles time and time again. Guys like Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon were such regulars out in those hills that the local woodland creatures started following them around, Snow White-style. (Though in Gordon’s case, the animals may just have been angling for future starring roles.)

Obviously, the major benefit to shooting in these hills was cost-effectiveness. They’re close enough to Hollywood that budget-minded directors could shoot all their location shots in one afternoon and be home in time for happy hour without burning so much as a full tank of gas. If you were shooting a cheap drive-in feature focused on bikers, monsters, hippies, aliens or any combination thereof, those grungy hills offered everything you needed. Also, they covered enough ground that nobody was likely to hassle you about permits and other such trivialities.

It’s also a relatively versatile landscape. The tall grass, sparse forests and rocky slopes and occasional creek beds are actually fairly distinctive, but they make a barely passable substitute for just about any terrain. I’ve seen those hills stand in for everything from prehistoric worlds to post-apocalyptic landscapes, to varying degrees of believability. (Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson hilariously pointed out “the famous Illinois Mountains” in Gordon’s Beginning of the End.) They’re like a mediocre impressionist – you never forget it’s him doing the voices, but you can at least sort of tell what he’s going for.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new cheapie shot out in that terrain. I suspect that has a lot to do with the rise of affordable filmmaking tools and the decline of in-theater sleaze. Today, just about any upstart with a digital video camera and a limited distribution model can crank out a straight-to-DVD monster movie full of digitally rendered effects and backgrounds. Shooting in one’s own backyard is easier than ever, and industry competition has gotten so heated that making a legit film in California is often an expensive proposition, even in the arid hills outside of Los Angeles.

In a way, that’s a shame, because it feels like we’ve lost an important element of low-budget filmmaking. But it also makes me kind of happy to know that this terrain will be forever tied to a specific age and a distinctive kind of movie. Hiking through Topanga Canyon a couple of summers ago made me feel like I was part of some zero-budget film shoot. At every bend in the path, I half expected to be set upon by acid-crazed bikers, cheaply costumed monsters or scantily clad space women. But the genres and budgets that facilitated those characters faded away as Hollywood passed on to a different age. Perhaps it’s best that the sweaty, rocky, gorgeously unremarkable landscape they called home is relegated to the same fate.

- Ira Brooker

Big (and bizarre) in Japan: “Executive Koala”

I’m sure Japanese pop culture doesn’t fully deserve its stateside reputation of being bizarre almost to the point of obscenity. I mean, obviously it can’t all be sadistic game shows, Hello Kitty underpants and tentacle porn. Some of the most thoughtful pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen came out of Japan, and the works of Haruki Murakami are evidence of a lyrical, forward-looking literary scene. Sure, the Japanese imports that make it to American shores tend to lean toward inscrutable TV commercials and hermaphrodite manga, but I like to tell myself that has more to do with cross-cultural filters and lazy stereotyping than a national tendency toward the gonzo.

But then I see something like Executive Koala and I’m right back to wondering what the hell is the matter with those folks. At first blush, this looks like a by-the-numbers psychological thriller, as a milquetoast businessman uncovers repressed memories of a sordid past that may include robbery, spousal abuse and even… MURDER! It’s the same type of hackneyed plotline we’ve seen in a dozen mediocre movies starring Michael Douglas/Richard Gere/Harrison Ford, but with one fairly noteworthy twist: the executive is a six-foot-tall, Japanese-speaking koala in a business suit.

If you’re familiar with director Minoru Kawasaki, that bit of bestial stunt-casting probably won’t catch you off guard. This is, after all, a man whose body of work includes films about a crime-fighting hairpiece and a squid who aspires to be a professional wrestler. I came into Executive Koala with only a cursory knowledge of Kawasaki’s work and was pleasantly perplexed at the way the film unfolded.

Early on, Executive Koala plays things pretty much by the book, following the koala through the mundanities of life at a thriving pickled foods company. The protagonist’s marsupial nature is treated as no big deal, even though the rest of the film’s populace is almost exclusively human. The only exceptions are the koala’s rabbit-headed boss and the frog-man behind the counter at the local grocery store. As the movie proceeds along familiar thriller lines, no explanation is offered as to why these freaks live and work among regular folk. Strange as all that seems, I spent much of the film’s first half disappointed that Executive Koala wasn’t weird enough.

Around about the midway point, however, Kawasaki starts to take things off the rails. As more and more details emerge about the koala’s ugly past, the movie’s tongue sinks deeper and deeper into its cheek. Before the show’s over, we’ve seen a series of absurd martial arts showdowns, one gut-busting musical number, a bit of animation and the revelation of a fantastically ludicrous motive behind all the madness. I could have done without a couple of meta-textual winks to the audience, but aside from that, it’s a helluva strong finish. The bizarreness of the second half casts a different light on the comparatively sedate beginning, making the “straight” scenes hilarious in hindsight.

It’s tough to imagine anything as peculiar as Executive Koala coming out of the U.S. Even an over-the-top studio like Troma would layer the production with a smirking self-awareness that’s mostly absent here. In fact, it’s difficult to think that something like this could be made anywhere but the home of heroic, flying turtles and Segway-riding chimps. Much as I hate to reinforce tired-out cultural stereotypes, there’s only one conclusion I can draw from Executive Koala:

Those Japanese are fuckin’ weird, man…

- Ira Brooker

Watching "Clockers" in a post-"Wire" world

When I read Richard Price’s novel Clockers back in high school, I was pretty well blown away. Here was a book that took me deep into a world about which I knew nothing, that of streetside drug dealers in the New Jersey ghetto. I was captivated by the dealers’ inscrutable lingo, their mysterious street names, the curiously malleable code by which they lived. It’s a hefty novel – more than 600 pages – but I breezed right on through, devouring Price’s muscular prose during study hall and between screenings at the movie theater where I worked.

Back in the mid-1990s, we were still feeling the hysterical reverberations of “Just Say No” and the D.A.R.E. program. Street gangs were an improbably omnipresent bogeyman, even in small town Wisconsin. That made Clockers’ treatment of the crack game all the more remarkable. It astonished me to see dope-slinging treated like any other business, and drug dealers depicted as actual people with feelings and families. Price tossed me deep into the heart of this foreign landscape by crafting a fully seen world, coloring his corners with the most vivid eye for detail I’d ever seen in a novel.

I first picked up Clockers in late 1995, in anticipation of Spike Lee’s forthcoming film adaptation. I was a devoted Spike Lee fan in high school, so the concept of Brooklyn’s own auteur bringing one of my new favorite novels to life was pretty exhilarating. Since it wasn’t the type of movie that was likely to play theatrically anywhere near Sparta, Wisconsin, I had to wait for the video release. When Clockers finally hit the shelves of Preferred Video (R.I.P.), I snatched it up and settled in to my friend Matt’s basement, anticipating a kick-ass evening of tension and artistry.

What I got instead was an okay adaptation that hit most of the right notes but never quite captured the spirit or urgency of the book. Here’s how much impact the movie had on me: at a literary trivia event a few years ago, I correctly answered four of five questions about Price’s novel, which I hadn’t read in 12 years, while the only question I missed was about the movie. In fact, the only elements of the adaptation that stuck with me over the years were Delroy Lindo’s brutal performance as the neighborhood kingpin and the irksome fact that the movie changed the protagonist’s favorite beverage from vanilla Yoo-Hoo to “Chocolate Moo.”

When I started watching the first season of The Wire last summer, Clockers was the first reference point that popped into my head. As the courtyard drama of David Simon’s masterpiece unfolded, I started to believe The Wire was a far better representation of Price’s work than Lee’s film was. There are plenty of obvious parallels between the two stories, most markedly in their lead drug dealers. The Wire’s DeAngelo Barksdale is essentially Baltimore’s answer to Clockers’ Strike, an ambitious young middle manager trying to save his soul while climbing the ladder. Both men have dreams that reach beyond the corner, but each is trapped by his personal relationship with his higher-ups.

DeAngelo mirrors Strike closely enough to make The Wire feel instantly familiar to me, but that didn’t distract one bit from my enthrallment with the show. It’s become almost a cliché to heap praise on The Wire, but every word of that praise is well deserved. (Yes, I am that annoying friend who won’t stop telling you how it’s The Best Thing That Has Ever Been on TV.) Anyway, David Simon and the first-season Wire writers go Richard Price one better by digging even deeper into the day-to-day business of slanging dope and the lives of those who do it. Anyone who’s been stuck in a draggy office job should be able to empathize with the dealers’ head-butting with upper management, disputes with unscrupulous customers and long stretches of stifling boredom. Even more than Clockers, the series drives home the idea that selling drugs is a job like any other, albeit one with an exceptionally high mortality rate. There’s little doubt that The Wire owes a lot to Richard Price, a debt that Simon paid back by bringing Price on board as a writer later in the series.

While jonesing for a Wire fix last weekend, I decided to revisit the Clockers video that’s been gathering dust on my shelf ever since I found it in a supermarket cut-out bin many years ago. (Underwhelmed though I was, I apparently I liked it well enough to drop three bucks on it back in the day.) I didn’t presume it would hold up to The Wire, but I was intrigued to see how much carryover there was between the two.

Clockers’ opening credits sequence – a montage of genuine crime scene photos of young black men killed by gunshots – could stand as shorthand for most of Spike Lee’s directorial career: it’s undeniably powerful, but remarkably heavy-handed. Thankfully, this isn’t one of Lee’s worst offenders, although he does shoehorn in some thudding commentary about social issues from guns to AIDS. Other than that and an oddly slow-jam-heavy soundtrack, I wouldn’t exactly say there’s much wrong with the film version of Clockers. The cinematography is lush and stylish and the acting is solid, with Lindo’s old school hustler and Keith David’s watchful cop standing out. In some ways, it’s a film ahead of its time; the depiction of life on the corners still looks more realistic and sympathetic than most anything that’s followed in its wake, with one major exception.

It’s that exception that really sunk Clockers for me this time around. The Wire looms so large that it seriously deadens the impact of any comparable work of fiction. For every effective aspect of Clockers, there’s a more indelible counterpart from The Wire. Sure, Clockers’ Rocco Klein is a charismatic cop who knows how to talk to dealers on their own terms, but he doesn’t approach the self-destructive brilliance of Jimmy McNulty. Lee does a good job of introducing Errol Barnes, a stone-cold killer with a haunted past, but he’s not half as scary/sympathetic as The Wire’s Chris Partlow. And when we meet a hero-worshipping young boy in danger of being seduced by the streets, no Wire fan could help but flash on the wrenching stories of Michael, Randy, Namond and Dukie.

None of this is Clockers’ fault, of course. It’s just that The Wire changed everything. Call it the Beatles effect: Their early music was fun, iconic and revolutionary in its own right, but the release of Revolver rendered songs like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” instantly dated, if not downright frivolous. The Wire simply lays waste to all that went before it. Procedural shows like Law & Order and CSI were never exactly heavyweights when it came to things like plotting, realism or dramatic integrity, but I could still sit down with them for some empty-headed entertainment. Now David Simon has rendered them nearly unwatchable for me. I’m afraid to revisit my previous all-time favorite cop show, NYPD Blue, because I don’t want the contrast to ruin it for me.

So where does that leave Clockers? Price’s book, I think, remains undiminished. Admittedly, I haven’t read it in more than a decade, but I still retain vivid memories of the bracing prose and fully drawn characters. In some ways, the novel may have been more cinematic than the movie. When I remember scenes from the story, they are as they played out in my head back in study hall, not as Spike Lee translated them to the screen. Price crafted a difficult, indelible novel that deserves its place among the best literature of recent decades.

As for the movie, I don’t want to be too hard on it. It’s an admirable adaptation, handsomely shot and populated with top-notch performances. It ranks in the top tier of 1990s “hood” flicks, yet it feels weirdly unsatisfying. Maybe my reaction would have been different had I gone into it with no knowledge of the book, but as it is the movie stands mainly as an interesting footnote to a couple of fantastic works of art. Lee’s work is more than passable, but I’m very glad that David Simon eventually (if indirectly) gave Price’s novel the adaptation it so richly deserved.

- Ira Brooker